Tensile testing machines are commonplace. Typically, a material test sample is clamped to a horizontal platform, and a clamping device attached to a force gauge is lowered in a vertical direction and attached to the test sample. Means are provided to move the clamping device and force gauge in an upward direction, thereby causing a tensile force to be applied to the test sample.
Commonly, samples are destructively tested in a large tensile testing machine, wherein a sample to be tested must be sacrificially extracted from a larger specimen for the sake of the test. Once the test has been completed, the sample is usually discarded, which can be prove to be very costly.
Typical tensile testing machines used for laminate bond testing only provide peeling movement in one direction, so that the electrical circuit line or other sample on a substrate being tested must be lined up along the one direction of movement. Unfortunately, this requires the substrate to be repositioned and clamped whenever a circuit line has a directional orientation different from the previous test direction. Further, when peeling a circuit line from a substrate, the force gauge must be constantly moved in order to keep the force gauge directly over the peeling location. This is necessary in order to ensure that a true force reading of the force perpendicular to the substrate is being measured.